BlackBerry CEO John Chen took the wind out of the proverbial sails of any further leaks regarding its upcoming handset codenamed Windermere. The chief on Thursday confirmed the handset's existence and that it'll arrive as the BlackBerry Passport in September.
Unfortunately the details stopped there so we have to rely on previous leaks. As you can see, the Passport is one of the strangest smartphones to come out of any company to date.
The squareish handset appears to have a large display and a small QWERTY keyboard. Sources claim the phone has a stainless steel band around the outer edge although we can't verify that from the leaked image. The volume buttons are positioned on the right side, we're told.
Rumored specs include a 1,400 x 1,400 resolution display, a quad-core Snapdragon MSM8974 processor, 3GB of RAM, a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera, a 2-megapixel front shooter and a 3,450mAh non-removable battery.
Sources also claim the keyboard could be capacitive in nature. For example, a user could swipe from right to left over the keyboard to delete words. Furthermore, when in landscape mode, the keyboard could be used to scroll while in a web browser, photo album, etc.
The specs certainly seem impressive but it's unclear whether or not the odd form factor would be a hit with the BlackBerry faithful.